Part 36

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"We must hurry!" Kastara momentarily startled Bursamen's attention from his gaze down at Tannac. "If he's back down there, he could destroy it, he could.....He might, we must hurry, come quick."

Bursamen stared through Kastara, his eyes sinking back down, leading his gaze back to Tannac. He'd seen so many others in the Cause die, but it was never so hard. "She'd always seemed half way to death" he remarked to nobody, and swallowed. "But that other half couldn't belong there."

He knelt down, staying his hand from touching the wound in Tannac's chest at her lower left ribcage area. The pulse blast had blown away a couple of inches of two ribs and left a cavity, probably matched on the back side. Bleeding was surprisingly minimal, probably because of the heat of the close range pulse fire. She lived, but he doubted the strongest body could survive long without drastic treatment that he knew she wouldn't receive. He couldn't even attempt to stitch it.

Almost without thinking, he busied himself snapping her badly broken forearm into place with angry efficiency. He had hoped that she would never regain consciousness, rather than dying in pain, but she gasped and stirred.

Her eyes fixed onto his. It took only a moment for her to realize what had happened, faced with her usual nihilism. "Course I wouldn't have any Jur on me." With her good arm she touched his face, numbly and briefly. "Frelling sentinels. She's so beautiful, so...."

"Don't try to talk, just...." Bursamen tightened his lips and looked aside.

"Had a Nugeth bar earlier. I'll be numb to, to the worst of the pain for a while yet, then....I've got a gun." Tannac tapped his cheek. "Protect them, don't shoot them, fekket."

Clasping her good hand, Bursamen leaned down and brushed his forehead against hers. She withdrew her hand. With a barely perceptible nod, he took the pistol and grenade she offered with her good hand, and hurried from the room.

Just outside of the doorway, he found himself running into Kastara. Bursamen drew back and lifted his brow slightly. "Yes" he suddenly remembered Kastara was there. "Back? Who? Destroy what?"

Kastara beckoned Bursamen with a hand, curling his fingers from the smallest to the largest. "There's a shorter way" he simply said, turning and leading Bursamen the opposite way John and Chiana had gone.

As if he were being watched, Kastara daintily hurried ahead of Bursamen down the hall and into a vast stairway. At the wall one landing down, Kastara moved the silken wall screens lining the walls aside, revealing a door. Bursamen waited for Kastara to open it and lead. As he entered the simple lift, Bursamen recognized the white stone material from the laboratory. "This looks like...."

"This wing was built on the older yes...." Kastara replied in a hushed voice. "We must hurry" he said, again, a dread creeping into his voice. "He could destroy everything."

"He's destroyed enough" Bursamen replied, his jaw clenched.

---

Korash stopped in the aisle when he approached a row of gray benches most of the way down the transport train car. Facing one side, he checked the chip in his hand. "Ah here we are, 2-24-5D and 5E" he gestured Sheyza to the bench. Sheyza smiled and looked aside at him with wide eyes, slipping by him and onto the bench. Korash sat on the bench and gestured her to scoot. "You have window seat, move all the way to the window seat" he insisted. "I'm right next to you" he scooted up and leaned in to press her against the window.

"Oh it's so cramped" she giggled.

"Yes" he nodded and shoved to the other side to make more room for them.

Sheyza giggled again and he laughed. After a moment they quieted down and looked around the otherwise completely empty car.

"But of course it's good of the Establishment to do it. Uh maintain transportation to the undesirable sections of the Metropolise. Maybe it is true that no one can actually use it except the elite or people from other revenue sectors who all have their own transportation, but it stays clean that way eh?" Korash ran his finger over the top of the bench in front of them as if checking for dirt.

"Korash" Sheyza giggled.

"Hm?"

"Shut up" she took his arm in hers and snuggled against his side, her wide eyes staring out the window.

"No, why should I? This is my great moment, and I plan to ruin it with whatever ignorant conversation I please. Well" he tilted his head, "it was your idea that made it all possible, but without me to use you, where would I be hm? Ooph!" he grunted as Sheyza locked his head in her arms and wrestled him down.

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"So if that's where Bursamen was" Tannac pointed out the directions to herself as she thought it out "and I went this way....I must have been pursuing the sentinel from that direction." Tannac continued down the corridor, coming to a stop when she heard something tumbling or falling in a dimly lit room. Peering inside, Tannac saw a scraggly young lady having just climbed in a window and tumbled over a fine furnishing.

The young lady made for a glowing plated vase on a table near the door and picked it up. Tannac came inside, put down her multi-facility pulse rifle, and took the vase. "What do you want with that thing?" Tannac lectured the young lady. The young lady looked Tannac up and down, half shocked and half terrified. "Don't be ridiculous" Tannac continued, "leave that stuff alone and get away from here while you can still save your skin." Tannac stared oddly at the young lady while the young lady stared back and walked backwards to the window. "Go on. Get. Leave the crazy stuff to crazy people."

The young lady backed out of the window, holding onto a rope of some kind that she'd thrown up into the window. But she saw several medallions of some kind on a display at the table in front of the window that she'd crawled over. She reached for the medallions, but her grip gave. Tannac cringed as the young lady screamed during her fall from the window ledge.

"Materialists" Tannac muttered, picking up her multi-facility pulse rifle, leaving the room and continuing down the corridor. "That's all anyone's coming to anymore. I need a smoke. No I don't, shut up. There! I did it, I answered myself, now I am fully fharbot, I knew it was going to happen, things couldn't be so bad they couldn't get worse, and what did they get? Worse. What else. Now look. It's so stupid! I'm worried that I'm not worried like I should be, or what? Spinning around the drain.....where is that Jur? Couldn't have melted. You can end this without blowing your own brains.....brains, or lack of. Why didn't I pick it up? Wasn't sure I was dead....like it was going to go some other way? Oh like I wanted it to? You're as good as dead, drannit, you don't have a frelling smoke and of course you've got to finish yourself. Who's listening? Oh and you're also alone, of course."

"Pipe!" she announced, both hands splayed in amazement at finding her smoke pipe on the floor, where it had fallen when her overcoat and shirt had disintegrated from the Sentinel's gas. Let go, the multi-facility pulse rifle swung on the shoulder strap, nearly pulling her backwards. Being dizzy, she staggered a little picking it up. When the multi-facility pulse rifle swung forwards, it pulled her over to fall on her side.

Looking straight ahead on the floor, Tannac next found a scrap of her overcoat that hadn't dissolved. "Modesty!" she remarked, amazed. She tried holding it over her middle, first one way, then the other. "Gotta be dressed for the garbage collectors." Using the damaged lapel still on her, she made a belt to hold the scrap on over herself. "Primitive yet....Now....where is...." she started looking for the dropper of marnnat.

"Ah!" she saw her dropper of marnnat against the wall and picked it up. "Krew. A smoke. And they say there's no Goddess" she held them up with one hand in thanks to the ceiling while taking out a pulse pistol. Trying to steady the trembling hand of the broken forearm enough and focus her eyes, she put a drop of marnnat in the pipe, and then used a shot from the pistol to light the pipe.

Tannac leaned back against a wall and took a long, slow smoke. "I wonder" she glanced questioningly at the ceiling.

Against the wall several feet away, she soon saw the package of Jur, where it had fallen as the gasses from the sentinel's attack had dissolved most of the fabric on her. One bite of the little green bar was all that was needed to counteract with the Nuggeth bar she'd already eaten, and she would finish herself quickly. She scowled at it. "Shouldn't last long anyway. No...." she exhaled the smoky breath and looked down at the hole in her lower left ribcage "should already be gone. No, too easy. It's never easy."

Tannac smiled as she took another drag, thinking about the awkward, misplaced man who frequently used the phrase "it's never easy." He might be the genuine John Crichton who knew the Sister, and was, as far as she cared. There was more truth in that flawed man than she'd seen in anyone before. "Chiana...." Tannac pressed the side of her face against the wall. In many ways she felt like she knew Chiana more than anything else, but still she remained elusive. There was little that Chiana hadn't meant to her in some way, at one time or another. She'd lived Chiana, sought to see everything through a sight she believed was Chiana's. It was the ultimate absurdity to know Chiana, only a person so much like herself after all, was caught in the great farce.

What was becoming of them at this very moment, she wondered, and what was going to become of them? Was knowing worse than not knowing? "More to the point" she asked herself, "is knowing any more of it your choice?" A sharp cough broke from her and she took another long, slow smoke of marnnat. "Now would be a good time." She looked around the empty corridor. "Of course nobody's asking you" she wryly observed, a bitterness to the sound in the quiet hallway.

As she mulled things over, and time she didn't care to notice passed, pulse blasts sounded from some distance away. "Down a stairwell, probably a couple hundred paces" she tactically assessed. It was probably enforcers and some of the rougher types. Enforcers would arrest Chiana and John Crichton, she knew. "Bursamen's with them" she reminded herself out loud. "It's in his hands now." But she didn't feel comforted nearly as much as she sounded. It wasn't a pleasant thought.

And she smelt a trace of smoke that wasn't from her marnnat pipe.

Tannac stepped away from the wall and checked the charge of the pulse pistol in her hand, then the charge of her multi-facility pulse rifle. "Is your head on your neck?" she asked herself. "Get what's left of your eema over and see they're safe." Nearly stumbling over, she picked up the Jur and the remainder of the Nuggeth bar from the floor on the way past, and dropped them into the holster of the pulse pistol she'd drawn. "And don't fall down" she added, hurrying towards the sounds in something resembling a brisk advance.

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"I'm trapped in fire!" a smoking, slightly blackened Oshana gripped John's shirt, pulling him into a black void of somewhere indefinable. Images of flames danced in her wild eyes.

"Huh?" John pried her hands off and looked around. "Where are we?"

"Never mind that, meeee! There are flames! My body, Larran's body, fire!" Reflected in her eyes, John could make out Oshana on the laboratory floor. Her golden glow shone along with the flickering light of fires around the room, lighting the otherwise darkened laboratory.

"Don't panic, damnit!" John shouted at Oshana, swatting out small fires on her clothing. "You're trying to say there's a fire back at the lab where you parked your car. And where Larran's pasty gray rump is. And you can't get back right now. Okay now think: if you weren't still alive in there, would you be here?!" he reasoned.

Oshana stilled and stared in thought, reason taming the wildness in her stare. "Yes" she realized. The top of her hand, frozen in mid-motion at her eye level, burst into flame. She screamed.

"Aaaah oh great!" John started having to swat out fires sprouting to life on himself. "Look wait, you mean if you cremate, I've got you under my skin?! Hey!" he tried getting her attention, but his effort was aborted with a maddening burn prickling inside.

Chiana burst from the darkness around him to cling on his back, encased in a luminous orange flame and screaming hysterically in consuming panic. "Save them!" she shrilly hollered.

"Chianaaaa!" he shouted as the burning and panic began to obscure all reason in touchless smoke.

The slap of a massive dumping of water deluged John, Chiana and Oshana from overhead. Chiana dropped off from John's back and staggered back a few steps. John blinked as water trickled down from his soaked head, one eye more open than the other. He blew out a breath, making a spray from the water trickling down over his lips, and slid his gaze darkly towards Harvey standing to his right with an emptied bucket in his hands, smiling eagerly in a ridiculous ill-fitting Smokey the Bear costume.

"Thanks" John curtly nodded once to Harvey with a glare. "Effects budget's gettin' a little on the McDonalds side around here" he observed before looking around the steaming burned out forest they were now standing in. "Anything's an improvement, I guess" he remarked, looking back to Chiana.

Chiana shook, crouched a little with her elbows out, then tilted her head to one side. As she hit the upper side of her head with the palm of her hand, a stream of water poured from her lower ear. She stopped and gawked as a fish slid from her ear and plopped onto the blackened forest floor.

"You all right Pip?" he had to smile.

Chiana looked up at him skeptically. "All right? W-with Oshana and Larran burning alive and you, h-hauling m-me there instead of- I gotta get fekface to my, to the rooms he put me in!"

"Look it'd really help to know why" he all but argued.

"Wanna tell me where the frell you're trying to take me?!" she all but argued back.

"I can't" he tightened his jaw. "If you know, he might know. Better if he's more off guard. I'm not saying I decided. I'll do what I have to. You really think I wouldn't think you wouldn't have a reason?" he asked.

A half smile broke out as the hope she was struggling to keep against her doubts was proven right.

"So can you keep your cool?" he asked. She swallowed and made a nod. "You're fine? You're not going to go Nebari Torch on us again right?"

"Nono, fine" she nervously agreed, shaking a foot that sounded with a watery slosh.

"Cool" John turned his attention back to a bewildered and drenched Oshana. "Look, Pumpkin, can't we wait and see what the truth is, before we freak out?"

"Then, then saaave uuuuuss before we burn!" Oshana began leaping in panic as several areas on her began sizzling, then breaking out in smoke and flames.

"Uh uh uh!" John pointed a finger up and at Oshana. A flame burst out of his finger. "Aaa!" he quickly blew it out "get dang...." he muttered then stuck his smoking finger back at Oshana. "Now: Only you" he moved his finger to point directly to her "can prevent forest fires."

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